Time to go it alone?

WHEN Crispin Gardiner attends international meetings he relishes being asked where he works: "They are amazed when I tell them what I do, and wish they could do the same."

Gardiner, a theoretical physicist who studies the intriguing state of matter known as a Bose-Einstein condensate, doesn't work for a university, a prestigious institute or a well-funded multinational research organisation. He is one of a small group of scientists in New Zealand who have kissed the establishment goodbye and set themselves up as independent researchers.

While Gardiner may have to answer his own phone, open his own mail and maintain his own computer, he is not forced to sit on the myriad committees and boards universities spawn, attend institute meetings, or feel obliged to be seen at his desk by colleagues. He supports the research lifestyle that makes him the envy of his peers with grants - administered by himself, naturally.

Such an arrangement would be impossible in most developed countries, but events came together in the late 1980s and 1990s to make it not only doable but highly desirable to an audacious few. Then, New Zealand science was in turmoil. Universities were increasingly being run like commercial organisations, with resulting anxieties about job security and a fall in morale. And the old government Department of Scientific and Industrial Research was split into Crown Research Institutes (CRIs), of which there are now nine, each set up as an independent company.

At the same time, funding became - in the jargon of the day - fully "contestable". In other words, a university, a company, a CRI or even an individual could compete for grants on an equal footing. The goal was to limit the government's role in setting the nation's research agenda, and allow market forces to do their damnedest. The hope was that private industry would take on a larger portion of New Zealand's R&D. It didn't happen, but the unexpected did: a handful of scientists jumped at the opportunity to go it alone.

For Gardiner, fully contestable grants provided an opportunity to cast off the shackles of running a physics department in an increasingly bureaucratic system. In 1995 he left the University of Waikato in Hamilton to become an independent scholar in Wellington.

Archaeologist Martin Jones of Analytic Research in Dunedin is another who craved freedom. Jones spends around a quarter of his working life developing ways of using radiocarbon techniques to date archaeological sites ever more accurately. He plans to use them to help determine what drove New Zealand's giant flightless moa to extinction.

Geoff Park of Wellington simply chose to follow the research he loves. As an independent scholar, he examines historical documents to discover how British colonisation altered the environment of New Zealand - a project that would not have been possible in his old job as a government botanist. He is paid as a contractor under a research grant to the Ngati Hine, the Maori tribe on whose land the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi was signed, giving Britain sovereignty over New Zealand. Their findings could help restore the environment, and understand why the Maori signed the treaty.

Although Park, Gardiner and Jones are the exception, there are enough independent scientists for this way of doing things not to be considered odd, says Don Smith of the Royal Society of New Zealand.

The Marsden Fund, New Zealand's most prestigious grant-awarding body, which is administered by the RSNZ, receives around 35 applications a year from independent researchers. Each year, some 5 per cent are funded, a success rate only slightly lower than that achieved by university and CRI researchers. Other independent scholars receive funding from the Foundation for Research Science and Technology (FRST).

Pros and cons

Independence is not without its drawbacks. For Park it's the relative lack of networking opportunities. "You are not part of a structure that brings people together. I meet with myself for morning tea," he says. The lack of status a university position confers on a researcher can also be irksome, although internationally it makes little difference. "Overseas people haven't heard of Palaecol Research or the University of Canterbury," quips independent vertebrate palaeobiologist Richard Holdaway of Palaecol Research in Christchurch. Some independents take up honorary positions at universities, where they perform light teaching duties in return for the status of the affiliation or use of a room or library facilities.

Financial security is also an issue. Gardiner does research full time, and makes around 80 per cent of a typical professorial salary with a little extra from book royalties. Only time will tell how well he has managed financial planning for his retirement, he says. Other independent senior scientists clearly resent having to survive on salaries of less than NZ$50,000 (about $35,000) - the salary of a junior academic in New Zealand. But Jones, a younger scientist who opted for independence early in his career, has no such concerns. He has a research grant worth NZ$99,000 over two years but the bulk of his salary - considerably more than a lecturer's - comes from providing services such as statistical analysis for market and agricultural research, and software development.

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